6 ( E "Well, I have to tell your publisher something. " . ting over, let alone forgetting, their pasts. There are also vast expanses of the crumbling Soviet empire, there is South Africa, there is Northern Ireland, and Central America and Sri Lanka and In- dia and Palestine, and even Crown Heights. True, in many of these cases the past gnevances have been artificially revived and exacerbated by demagogues intent on their own short-term tactical advantages, but the point is that popula- tions in all these places are susceptible to such demagogic appeals precisely be- cause the past, far from haVIng been for- gotten, remains a terrible, festering wound. A certain kind of forgetting-or, rather, a getting over, a superseding-is exacdy what is needed in many of these places, "Nations are a plebiscite every day," the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote at the end of the last cen- tury, "and they are built on great rememberings and great forgettings." And yet what's called for is not the obliviousness of simple denial. The Pol- ish master Zbigniew Herbert warned in a poem recalling the immediate after- math of the Second World War, "Igno- rance about those who have disappeared undermines the reality of the world." (Surely this unreality, this vertiginous substancelessness of experience, is the sort of thing Kundera was bewailing in those lines from his novel.) Shoring up the reality of the world, however, is by no means easy. Shortly after the liberation of France, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty observed: We have learned history, and we claim that it must not be forgotten. But are we not here the dupes of our emotions? If, ten . years hence, we reread these pages and so many others, what will we think of them? We do not want this year of 1945 to be- come just another year among many. A man who has lost a son or a woman he loved does not want to live beyond that loss. He leaves the house in the state it was in. The familiar objects upon the table, the clothes in the closet mark an empty place in the world. . . . The day will come, however, when the meaning of these books and these clothes will change: once. . . the clothes were wearable, and now they are out of style and shabby. To keep them any longer would not be to make the dead person live on; quite the opposite, they date his death all the more cruelly. The challenge, then, is not so much to forget as to remember in a living way, a way that makes room-that al- lows room-for the living, in all their newness. Hannah .AIendt was on to something crucial in her 1958 book "The Human Condition" when-a Jew writing barely a decade after the Holocaust-she in- sisted on the primacy of forgiveness: 'Without being forgiven, released from the consequence of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would re- main the victims of its consequences for- ever." For .AIendt, forgiveness was essen- tial to human freedom: "Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new." This capacity for initiation, for beginning something new, is the core wonder at the heart of .AIendt's depiction of the human condi- tion. It is the great hope. And yet the forgiveness she sees as the ground for that hope is not a simple forgetting. If anything, it is a highly charged and continuously re- charged form of remembering. Nor can it be accomplished in isolation. "N 0 one can forgive himself, [just as] no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself," Arendt notes in a passage with particular relevance to the departing or mutating dictatorial regimes, in Latin America and else- where, that, as a routine final gesture before surrendering power, lavish blanket amnesties upon themselves. As Arendt declares, "Forgiving and prom- ising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self." True forgiveness is achieved in community: it is something people do for each other and with each other-and, at a certain point, for free. It is history working itself out as grace, and it can be accomplished only in truth. That truth, however, is not merely knowledge: it is acknowledg- ment, it is a coming-to-terms-wlth, and it is a labor. Ironically, in places where former antagonists refuse to ac- knowledge the horror of their past depredations, full-scale trials-the painstaking laying out and proving of guilt, under exacting conditions of due process-may be both necessary and salutary before any forgiveness can be extended. And such forgiveness makes sense only in the context of starting anew-something that cannot be done if the prior malefactors retain their po- sitions of authority, immune and un- accountable. Such forgiveness is never done once and for all: the past is kept alive, is continually revisited, but in the mode of supersession, of moving on. In Sarajevo and Belgrade, in Hebron and Belfast and N agorno- Karabakh and San Salvador and Soweto and Los An- geles, there is tremendous work waiting to be done-not only the work of finding some concrete way of securing the democratic rights of minorities within their larger polities, but also the equally daunting work of finding ways of advancing the spiritual and ma- terial well-being of the entire popula- tion. The point is to get on with that work as, precisely, a way of honoring the past. .